


What's Your Damage?

by WolfSpider



Category: Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-21
Updated: 2019-02-21
Packaged: 2019-11-01 16:13:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17870492
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WolfSpider/pseuds/WolfSpider
Summary: Growing up is learning when to let someone take care of you.





	What's Your Damage?

Miles was five years old when he first learned what pain was like. At that age everything is tender and new; everything is an _experience_. Tripping over a raised hairline fracture in the concrete sidewalk on the way home from kindergarten and sanding a layer of skin from his knee just happened to be a bad one. He sat on the curb for a few moments, watching beads of bright blood well up like rubies across the scrape through watery eyes, and felt sorry for himself, and then, because he had to, slowly walked the rest of the way back to the house.

His mother was home, in the kitchen, filling up the hall and the foyer and the living room with the incense smoke of spice and tender grilled chicken and baking beans, and that took a little of the pain away, even if the sudden, affronted shock of it was still radiating down through torn skin to muscle and bone the way heat from a burn does, becoming a part of him. Miles hadn’t expected her to be there, though her schedule at the hospital was shifting and unpredictable: one morning she would wake him with a fresh steaming plate of huevos rancheros, already in her pale sea green scrubs when he was still peeling sleepy-eyed out of pajamas, and the next it would be his father rapping on the bedroom door, gruffly calling out to rouse him while she slept off a long graveyard night two doors down. So it was nice to find her there, in the kitchen; a kinder surprise.

She’d been listening to wordless, wild dance music as she cooked, but when she saw him in the doorway, saw his face streaked with tears, she switched off the small transistor radio by the stove at once and knelt down, knees on the linoleum, to sweep him into her arms. “Ah, _mi corazón_ ,” she murmured softly, sharing his grief, and stroked his hair and the back of his head while he nuzzled wetly into her shoulder. “Let’s get you fixed up.”

Miles had seen the heavy, serious business first aid kit she kept in the bathroom, tucked beside the plunger between sink and toilet, but hadn’t know what it was for. She sat him on the cold slippery edge of the bathtub and Miles concentrated very hard on not sliding off while she clicked it open, a big translucent plastic box the size and shape of a briefcase, segmented and compartmentalized inside, bursting with the tools of her trade. In time he’d come to identify the rolls of gauze and cloth medical tape, the boxes of breathable band-aids in all shapes and sizes to cover and stick around any cut, the crinkled yellow and silver tubes of antiseptic ointments rolled up at the ends like old toothpastes; sterile needles and cotton in ball and swab form and individual square alcohol pads, breakable cold packs and powdery latex gloves and a tiny bottle of Tylenol to keep inflammation down, a treasure chest of useful things. Rio plucked out one of the wrapped sterilization wipes and tore the packet open, pressing the damp alcohol-marinated cloth against the wound until it throbbed fresh all over again.

When he whimpered, Rio pressed a kiss to his other knee. “Shh, Miles,” she said. Already the sting of it was beginning to recede, leaving an aching numbness that he could live with. “It will be alright. Everything will be just fine now.”

Miles was skeptical. But because he loved her, he believed it. After Rio had applied a big rectangular bandage that stood out pale against his skin and washed her hands and put the kit away they went back into the kitchen, and she let him taste how her soup was coming, and they listened to the music, and aside from the vague pulsing pressure in his knee, Miles let himself forget he’d been hurt at all.

How quickly these things become normal.

\---

“ _Shit_ , ow, goddamn it--”

Blood smeared the flesh of his arm dark and slightly tacky, gooey and thick as slowly drying corn syrup, and it stuck the ragged open edge of his suit to the wound as Miles tried to skin himself out of it. In some distant place of his heart that felt only annoyance he was more irritated at the ruined fabric than the quarter-inch deep gash running from wrist to elbow; muscle was easy to heal, but repairing ripped spandex required more effort and maybe money he didn’t have at sixteen. Miles way preferred trading punches to back-alley knife fights.

He tried to keep his voice down, wincing as he stripped off the suit and shrugged out of it shoulders first. He hadn’t noticed the wound when it had happened, flush with the natural anesthetic of adrenaline and concentrating more on where the next blow was about to come from than on injuries he’d already suffered and couldn’t take back. Given twenty minutes to cool down and the relative safety of his mentor’s apartment, though, the pain was creeping in, every severed nerve waking up and blaring _danger!_ at his brain while the split ends of those wires sparked, too late for the complaint to do any good. Maybe the pain was more of a punishment, a deterrent, his body telling him not to do anything this damned fool stupid again. If so, that wasn’t going to work either.

“God _damn_ it,” Miles hissed again, flipping the joints of his forearm around to examine the cut. He could see his own muscle in there, slick and grey-purple and sickeningly shiny, and blood beginning to well up in it again, a lethargic ooze. He was still half-in, half-out of the suit, the empty head and arms flopping around his waist while he held his arm at an unnatural angle away from him, trying not to drip fat drops of scarlet onto his white undershirt.

He felt Peter’s approach pushing at him before he saw him stalking over from where he’d been at the kitchenette sink, splashing water over a rising bruise along the sharp line of his jaw. “Let me see that,” he demanded, crooking his fingers in a _c’mon, pony up_ kind of gesture, and snorted when Miles hugged his arm tighter to himself instead, instinctively twisting out of sight. “Miles.”

“It’s fine, man,” Miles said, feeling a trickle of something hot and wet run down the inside of his arm. “I’m all cool over here. Don’t worry about me.”

“ _Miles_ ,” Peter said again, firmer. In the dim light of the apartment-- Peter only seemed to own one lamp, and its oily yellow light cast long shadows --he looked tired in an unfamiliar way. Where the rush of midnight adrenaline and triumph and post-scuffle high-fives had worn off he’d been left burned down to nothing, a middle aged man up way past his bedtime. His exasperation went down bone deep, and kept going. “What, you think I’ve never gotten banged up in a fight before? Show me.”

“For real,” Miles said, but he held out his arm, bent at the elbow, hand making a fist. “Me too. You don’t have to take it so serious.”

Peter touched him gingerly, with a foreign tenderness that scraped at something more fundamental inside of Miles, and he held his fingers under the soft underside of his arm to let Miles lean on him a little, take some of the weight off his shoulder. He rotated his arm around a bit, noting how Miles tried not to wince again when turning the torn flesh tugged at it in ways that sent sparks of new pain skittering up his skin. Miles could name every bone in the arm: radius, ulna, humerus, the tiny delicate mechanisms inside the wrist, knew how-- had already been _taught_ how, by someone with more formal training than Peter --to identify where and how and how badly he’d been hurt. Peter’s big hands were gentle and his eyes were darkened with concern, and it just made Miles want to take his arm back and go away; made him feel like a little kid again, being taken care of.

He didn’t want to be like a kid with Peter.

“Sit down,” Peter told him, tossing his head towards the kitchen table. “Wait there.” Though he grumbled to himself, Miles did it, sitting stiffly in one of Peter’s uncomfortable bare wooden chairs and stripping the rest of the way out of the clinging, stuffy spider suit while he waited for him to rifle through kitchen cabinets, watching Peter pull out handfuls of things he recognized from odd places, folded up gauze squares and band-aids squirrelled away in caches for whenever he might need them. He came back to the table with an armful of stuff that got spread across it and a tiny box the size of a sewing kit with a bold red plus sign on the lid. Miles drummed his fingers anxiously across the top of the table.

“What’s all that for?” he asked.

Peter threw himself down in another chair that creaked under his weight and squeaked the legs of it across the floor until they were very close together, close enough that their bony knees knocked against each other. “You’re gonna get scraped up a lot in this line of work,” he said, thumbing the first aid kit open, and caught in the memory of Kingpin’s boot against the side of his face two years ago and a thug’s fist smashing him into the rough implacable solidness of a brick wall just last week, Miles didn’t argue. “You have to know how to patch yourself up.”

“Sure.” Miles shrugged. “If it gets too bad--”

“No hospitals,” Peter said, as firm as he’d ever been about anything. Miles settled in his seat and let the back of the chair hold him up as Peter took hold of his arm again, arranging it against the table for support while he worked. Everywhere his fingers touched stung, for no physical reason; that pain was all inside. “That’s the hell of it,” he said. “There’s no help. Just us.”

Gauze was administered, pressed in a long strip to the weeping wound, and Miles used his free hand to clamp steady pressure down over it without being asked while Peter assembled other supplies. He thought about his mother, with him, with her patients, calm and sure and professional, bandaging them up, making them better. “So, who taught you to do this?” he asked as Peter lined up the things he would need: bottle of saline wound wash, antiseptic ointment, needle, thread, more gauze. All things Miles knew would hurt for awhile, before they helped.

Peter glanced at him. “Me,” he said. Then, “That’s gonna need stitches if you don’t want it to scar too bad. You okay?”

Miles thought about Peter as a young man in his Aunt’s kitchen snuck in past midnight, by himself, pressing a sewing needle to an orange-hot gas burner to sterilize it and nearly biting through his own lip to keep himself quiet while he passed it through the jagged edges of his opened flesh, the kind of dumb thing he’d do; thought about him splinting broken fingers, trying to set his own smashed-in nose and not doing it quite right, so that even when it healed in time it would be crooked off-center forever. Thought about how his fingers had felt, rough from a lifetime of small scars, against Miles’ still mostly smooth skin, and then he thought about taking the needle from him, the gauze, saying, _My mom’s a trauma nurse, I’ve got this_.

It was a gift Peter was trying to give him, he realized; the gift of not being alone. He relaxed his fist, let his hand open flat against the table, the tension in his knuckles the only sign that he’d braced for the prickle of more pain. “Okay,” he said. “Do it. Show me.”

\---

By now, Miles was an old pro at breaking into his bedroom at home undetected-- it was just that, usually, he didn’t have to try to do it with an injured old man in tow. Tonight’s team-up fight had gone well, technically, Electro subdued and in police custody, everyone still alive and breathing; Peter had shot him a thumbs up afterward, ignoring how Miles couldn’t the way his suit was half-melted to his shoulder: _I call that a win._

Miles pulled the bulk of Peter’s body through the window after him, with minimal assistance. He smelled like a drag race, like burned rubber and sweat and a hot, sour summer day. “It’s gonna be okay now, Pete,” he said under his breath, shuffling Peter over to the low well-made twin bed and sitting him on it, one hand heavy on his good shoulder and pushing down until Peter’s knees buckled and he sank into the mattress.

“Sure,” Peter grunted, rolling a shoulder that wanted to be locked; even through his mask Miles could see the way his mouth twisted underneath, pain eating away at him like acid. “Let me sleep it off. Your folks won’t even know I’m here.” He sat on the edge of the bed in obvious discomfort, unsure what the proper way was to put himself, and Miles hesitated a moment before leaving him alone, rocking unsteadily back and forth on the balls of his feet.

“Just hold up a minute,” he said, like he could really stop Peter from disappearing if he didn’t want to be there enough, and he went out into the hall, holding his breath while he he eased the door shut again behind him to encourage it not to creak. He padded softly down past the door to the living room, his parents’ room, trailing fingertips down washed-out sky blue walls that were as familiar to him as anywhere could be, cat burglar creeping in his own home. He didn’t turn the light on in the bathroom, just let street lamps refract through the square window above the bathtub while he fumbled around behind the sink; after a moment’s pawing his fingers closed around the rounded-off corner of his mother’s professional first aid kit and he dragged it out. It felt heavy in his hands, still huge for what it was. He hadn’t been back here in awhile.

When he returned to the room that was still his Peter had stretched himself out stiff as a corpse on the bed, mask rolled up over his nose, and his breath was coming fast and shallow, in a practiced, rhythmic pattern. “Sit up,” he whispered, and reached down to help him. The mind doesn’t hold onto the memory of pain-- trying to call back the sensation of being burned, the few times he had been, on a hot stove or coffee carelessly, brought back the shape of it but not the sensory pang of heat seeping through flesh. He couldn’t relate, but he could sympathize. What Peter was feeling now was doubtlessly worse than any minor cooking accident he’d suffered, anyway, a searing, boiling sensation. By the light of an LCD clock radio no one had reset after Daylight Savings last Miles found the edge of Peter’s suit where it moulded up under his jaw and helped him peel it back, opening at the neck and pulling downward.

He was partially surprised it came away from Peter’s shoulder at all, but it did, while Peter shivered and sucked at his teeth, hand clenching convulsively at his knee. “You don’t have to,” he said, shakily and playing it off into a breathy laugh, while Miles examined the burn. It was a huge mottled blotch across his shoulder and upper chest, pale skin inflamed shiny and red and blistered, still angry hot. _He’s alive_ , Miles reminded himself. _It’s over, for today_. And then heard his mother’s particular doctor voice saying in his head, _For a burn larger than two or three inches, you should seek professional medical attention._ “I can do that, Miles, don’t worry about it.”

Under Miles’ own suit, a scar like whip-thin lightning still lanced up his left arm, only slowly fading into familiar flesh, and every time Miles remembered it, in the way you might sometimes become aware of yourself through the course of a day, he remembered Peter’s strong hands holding him, carefully knitting him back together. There in his old bedroom the eyes of sports stars and action heroes looked down at them from faded posters, a spray of glow in the dark stars twinkled their gentle green radium shine from the ceiling, and Miles just remembered being tucked in after hard days, gentle fingers wrapping ice around tight sprains. He wondered what the purpose was of giving up comfort with age, trying to be a man by pretending it wasn’t happening when you were falling apart.

“Did MJ ever take care of you?” he asked, uncapping a tube of viscous Neosporin and squeezing a thick gush of it out onto his fingers. “When you were hurt, right, you let her know?”

Peter looked away, the corner of his mouth pulling down, so it was a fresh shock that made him tremble again when Miles pressed his hand to his chest, spreading the ointment around slick and filmy, letting it sit on and seal in his injured skin. “Sometimes,” he said. “But that was a long time ago.”

“Yeah,” Miles agreed, and he put his palm flat to Peter’s chest, feeling his heart there. “It was.” How many years, near the end of their marriage, when he’d gone back to sequestering himself in the bathroom at three in the morning while she slept, trying not to wake her with his pain? How many years on his own after that, when there had been no one to worry about, and no one to worry about him? Never again, Miles told himself. Only this, now, their hands holding each other, sure and steady.

Miles thought back to all the lectures on burn hygiene he’d suffered growing up. After the ointment and the aloe vera came the bandages, wound only loosely so the skin could breathe and not too thick. The shoulder was a hard area to wrap, but they could make like a sling of it; the only worry was there wouldn’t be enough gauze and bandage roll in the box, but there was an all-night chain pharmacy three blocks down, he could be there and back in ten minutes…

It was easier to think about that than the transgressive intimacy of the bandaging itself. _Who takes care of you, Peter?_ Miles asked himself, and knew that the answer was no one, not even himself a lot of the time. He wound the dwindling spool of gauze around Peter’s wide chest under his armpit, crossing up over his collarbone to wrap over the ball of his shoulder, again and again. “Is it okay?” he asked after a few rotations, meaning the pressure: not too tight, not too restricting.

Peter’s eyes were on him, though the mask, which was easier, watching his hands, watching his own chest disappear under bandages, slowly mummified. “It’s nice,” he decided, not talking about the pressure at all. “Thanks, ah, for this.”

Another feeling settled over him, something tender and new, the inverse and opposite of pain. “We have to look out for each other,” Miles said, and reached up to pull Peter’s mask the rest of the way off, man to man, spider to spider. “No one else is gonna.”

Eventually, you’d forget you’d ever been hurt.


End file.
